Hospital manager admits $1m fraud

A hospital manager who helped steal £585,000 – thought to be one of the biggest frauds against a single NHS trust – is facing a long jail term.

Joy Henry, 47, siphoned off the money over four years from King’s College NHS Trust, and split the proceeds with her then boyfriend, who is still missing.

Henry, of Elliot Court, South Norwood, admitted one count of conspiracy just before her trial was due to start.

Judge Christopher Elwen said she had carried out a flagrant breach of trust.

Southwark Crown Court heard Henry had been the head of the trust’s staff bank, an in-house agency used by staff wanting overtime.

Between January 1999 and November 2003, she added several non-existent staff names to the payroll and frittered away some of the proceeds, the court heard.

She is thought to have split the money with her former boyfriend, Joseph Oduguwa, 42, who is believed to have fled to Nigeria.

There will not be a confiscation hearing as the NHS has begun a civil case against Henry, the court heard.

After admitting the conspiracy charge, her defence barrister, Kerim Fuad, said Henry was a “rabbit caught in the headlights of her own deception” and was “full of remorse”.

But the judge told her she had carried out a “flagrant, organised and well thought-out breach of trust” which resulted in her “making away, in a systematic manner, with what was a very considerable sum of public money”.